


Dream You Awake

by Ferrero13



Series: The King's Man [1]
Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015), The King's Speech (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Gen, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Pining, not yet anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 02:56:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4730165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferrero13/pseuds/Ferrero13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eggsy finally meets the stammering voice in his dreams.</p><p>It doesn't stammer anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream You Awake

**Author's Note:**

> This is pre-relationship. I can't find the pre- tag for the Harry/Eggsy relationship tag, so I'm just leaving it as it is. If it bothers you, you're welcome to wait until I finally write any subsequent instalments.
> 
> 07/11/2015: In light of new information volunteered by Beguiled, I've changed the Queen's nickname from Bessie to Lilibet.
> 
> 08/11/2015: Marina78 reminded me that the Queen Mother passed away very recently, such that there's no way that Helena could be her incarnate. Perhaps just...forget that I made such an elementary mistake and pretend that Helena is somehow her incarnate.

It starts when Lee Unwin dies. Eggsy is old enough to understand that death means never coming back, and old enough for it to give him nightmares.

When he closes his eyes, he sees flashes of gold and opulence and hears explosions tearing through air to whisper of fire and loss in his ears. There is a whistling overhead that draws cold fingers down his spine, one that scares him because it sounds like a harbinger of darkness, because he’s not used to whistles that don’t break out in song. He’s old enough to understand death, but he’s not old enough to understand this.

The noises, the bone-deep chill that seeps through his blankets, come to him every night in his sleep. For a long time Eggsy tucks himself in next to his mother and wraps her arms around him, but the bitter winter of the despair threading through his dreams still slips through his mother’s embrace and drags him into a world that’s half eerily silent—a waiting game for something Eggsy doesn’t know—and half cast in screams.

He learns to sleep in fits, jerking awake at the slightest rustle of curtains.

A few years later something else steals into his dreams. There is a voice, a stuttering, stammering tenor that nevertheless steadies him despite wavering and breaking in between visions of flames and scorched earth. If he waits long enough, black smoke and frozen breaths melt into the warmth of that halting cadence, and Eggsy feels a peace that has been missing for years.

As he transitions from a child to a teenager, his dreams become less like the ramblings of an incoherent madman. He hears snippets of conversations, catches glimpses of a shuttered face with a trembling jaw and lips firmly pressed in hard resolve. A burst of sunlight illuminates a ceremonial blade, a shimmer of starlight catches on a ring, and the dancing light of a fire pulls the silver from a head of tousled hair. Words are half swallowed as they are pushed from a clenching throat, words of encouragement and of hope, words of strength that he knows, somehow, are meant to be spoken quietly in his ear.

There is an echo of a name that weaves through these moments. It is a stately name, a quiet name, a beloved name. He cherishes it as if it were his own, lips curling around soft vowels like a kiss, tongue lovingly forming the consonants that follow after. It fades frustratingly from memory the moment he wakes, gone like the wisps of a smoking ember.

Candlelight eventually resolves into a spectacle of shifting crystal chandeliers and sparkling wineglasses. Feathers sway gently above a dozen elaborate hats, and shining shoes snap sharply against uncarpeted floors with smart breaks of sound. Amidst the glamour and the glitter, there is a heavy weight underscoring the whole affair, and the brightness of silverware blisters away until all that is left is the shaking, unsteady stammer of that beloved voice.

It is laced with worry and haunted by fear, a deep, rooted uncertainty of falling short. There is determination, too, and an overflowing of sacrifice, the kind that Eggsy can do nothing to stop, helpless but to watch as the only bright spot of his otherwise desperate dreams burn away into all-consuming duty.

Then everything disappears, drowned by the quiet hopelessness that pervades the act of waiting. Uniforms, once starched and smartly pressed, are dyed an ugly shade of mud and dried blood. Rain pours like tears from the sky, a shuddering cold press of anguish that brings with it the cries of those whose stations will not let them lay their lives in the line of fire. It feels like resignation and heartbreak. It also feels like condemnation and redemption for the sin of loving somebody not his to love.

Each drop bites like needles and knives through his uniform and into his skin.

He knows, with startling clarity, why the warmth and dryness of firelight has turned away from him. There are lines he must not cross, and if he stays he will cross them, and then his ledger will be smeared with so much red that no war he wins for King and country will wipe it clean. He is an aberration, a dark mark on the name that he no longer has any right to say, for he has so wronged it. He is undeserving to even think of it.

So he marches off to a wet front, a place so drenched in the vile scent of patriotic abandon and bleak disquietude, willing to trade his life to make things right.

The sights are much clearer now, and the sounds sharp and vivid in his ears. The stench of death clogs his lungs, his eyes crossing as memories of a far happier time replay over and over again while his chest shudders and his body clings painfully on to life. The letter in his hand is soaked through with red and brown and singed at the edges with black, but the words of the person who taught him to read and write are so painfully legible.

He reads and reads, desperately gasping short, agonising bursts of air to stay the hands of death long enough to trace every letter with eyes that swell with an overflowing of guilt. He doesn’t deserve this, but the affection that pours from the words etched onto paper, words that flow so smoothly from the fingers that hold his heart but not from the lips that he has never felt against his skin, is ambrosia to him. He doesn’t deserve this, not after being tempted time and time again to betray the only people who have shown him kindness, but he wants it. He wants to finish this before the scythe falls around his neck.

His vision darkens when he finally makes it to the flourish of a familiar name, and Eggsy gasps awake.

\---

So apparently Eggsy almost had an affair with a King in a previous life. Or something. He’s not quite sure he believes in reincarnations, but the dreams, the ones that have plagued him for years and years, feel so real.

He looks up the army records and finds Edward Brittain1 amongst a list of casualties, and it’s such a strange feeling to know that an incarnation of him is now forever immortalised in stone on a World War II memorial wall. It’s just one name of so many, but it’s there, and this is _real_. It’s too much of a coincidence to not be.

He joins the Marines for this reason. There was nowhere else he could’ve gone anyway with the kind of academic record that he had especially in the later years of his education when Dean’s periods of domestic violence finally became a permanent fixture in his life.

\---

His mother begs him to leave the Marines.

Five months later Eggsy finishes training and accepts the highest honour awarded to any individual of a graduating batch. He sends back his first paycheque with a request that his mother find a decent divorce lawyer.

\---

It is years later, after a series of rapid promotions and when he has finished a day of gruelling training sessions—more gruelling for the men under him than for himself—that he spots him.

There, right outside his barracks, is a familiar face, and the name that falls from his mouth spills forth like a reverent whisper.

“Albert?”

The man stiffens and when his eyes catch Eggsy’s they widen and he utters as if in disbelief, “Edward.”

“Oh my god,” Eggsy breathes. “You’re _real_.”

Albert glances down at himself, then back up at Eggsy. “Yes, it would appear so,” he says, arching an eyebrow. What a little shit, Eggsy thinks to himself, and it sparks an unexpected fondness in him.

“No, I mean,” Eggsy stumbles over his words, and it’s a lot less endearing than he remembers stammers to be. It also makes him suddenly aware that Albert’s words are flowing from his tongue like a string of pearls, words smooth and beautifully strung together, a river of syllables that once was a choppy sea. It is an odd experience to hear him this eloquent. “This is gonna sound crazy, but I think I’ve accidentally dreamed you awake.”

The man who can only be Albert—he has to be Albert, nobody else he knows has ever referred to him as Edward—looks him up and down, and finally says, “We should move this conversation somewhere more private.” He gestures with his umbrella to the gates of the camp. Eggsy raises his eyebrows dubiously, but Albert just waves for him to follow.

Nobody checks anybody’s ID. The guards on duty give Albert curt nods but otherwise ignore the two of them. Eggsy has to physically stop himself from asking if Albert’s still actually King even though he knows well enough that Queen Elizabeth (Lilibet! His adorable little Lilibet is all grown up and ruling countries!) is well and hale and there isn’t anybody in line for the throne that looks the least bit like Albert.

There’s a pub not too far away. They order a couple glasses of beer and settle into a booth in a corner.

“So. You was a King,” Eggsy says, eyeing Albert’s impeccable suit. Bespoke, most likely.

“In another life,” Albert acknowledges, taking a sip. “I’m a tailor in this one. I must confess I that I did not expect to meet anybody I knew, much less someone who remembers.”

“Neither did I,” Eggsy shrugs. “You raised ‘er well. Lilibet’s a great Queen.” He read up on King George VI the moment the pieces start falling into place. Eggsy himself died in the middle of the war, so everything else about Albert after that had to be gleaned from Wikipedia and myriad sites managed by royalty fanatics. Albert should’ve listened to Logue when he told him to stop smoking.

“If I recall, you had a hand in that as well.” Albert smiles demurely at him from over the rim of his glass.

“I fed ‘er when you two was off at a dinner party. That don’t count as raisin’ a Queen,” Eggsy brushes off. Albert had picked him up off the streets in an unusual show of kindness on an unspectacularly wet and dreary English morning (as all English mornings were wont to be wet and dreary), brought him in to dry off, and offered him a job as a servant when it became known to him that he was an orphan. When the girls were born, he doubled as their go-to nanny.

“She quite fancied you for a bit, you know,” Albert tells him amusedly.

“Shut up,” Eggsy gapes. “The _Queen_?”

“She got over it,” Albert assures him. “You know of Philip, of course. She confided in me that she transferred her affections to him in 1939. But it still damn near broke her heart when we learned of your passing.” Here, his jaw tightened. “It was a difficult time for us all. You were like family.”

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Eggsy says sheepishly. “If it ‘elps, I weren’t plannin’ on dyin’ neither.”

“That only makes it worse, actually,” Albert says flatly.

Eggsy grimaces. “My bad.”

“No, the fault is all mine; I shouldn’t have brought it up. It must be worse for you, being the one dying, after all.”

“To be ‘onest, the worst part of rememberin’ ain’t the dyin’,” Eggsy confesses.

Albert looks intrigued. “Indeed?”

“There was…other things goin’ on,” Eggsy evades, then winces. “Ain’t the best years of my life. I weren’t proud of ‘em.”

“Dare I ask?”

“Let’s just say I ‘ad some inappropriate feelin’s an’ leave it at that, yeah?”

“Not for my wife, surely?” Albert enquires, though he doesn’t appear outraged so much as amused. Eggsy suddenly wonders if Albert has a wife now, too.

“No, not for the Missus,” Eggsy swears. “Never the Missus. She’d skin me alive.” It wasn’t like she—and the whole of England—wouldn’t have skinned him either if she knew the sort of thoughts he had about her husband, but that is a thought best left to his more self-deprecating moments. He’d very much like to catch up now without feelings—and a not-so-insignificant identity crisis— getting in the way, thank you very much.

“Come, now. Elizabeth was a reasonable woman and romantic at heart. I’m sure she would be silently cheering you on from the peanut gallery,” Albert chuckles. “Unless, of course, you were eyeing one of my daughters?”

“No, Sir,” Eggsy snaps immediately. “If I was still around I’d ‘ave been with you interrogating poor Philip ‘bout ‘is intentions towards Lilibet. Is ‘e a good man?”

“No less than I would have chosen for Elizabeth myself, though the press and his pedigree may have tried to convince me otherwise.”

“Then that’s good enough for me,” Eggsy declares.

“What you think now wouldn’t make a difference, I’m afraid,” Albert hums, “but I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.” Eggsy’s eyes follow the long line of his throat as Albert takes a long swallow. He quickly averts his gaze before Albert can catch him staring. “You should call me Harry. Harry Hart. I haven’t been Albert in over half a century, now.”

Eggsy takes the proffered hand and shakes it. “‘M Eggsy. Unwin. Well, Gary Unwin, but nobody, not even my mum, calls me that.”

“Lee’s son?” Al—Harry asks, sounding somewhat astonished.

“Yeah. You knew ‘im?”

“Your father saved my life. If it weren’t for him, my mistake would’ve cost the lives of everyone in the room.”

“Very dangerous job, tailoring.”

Harry's lips tipped up just the slightest bit. “Quite.”

“So you was the one that gave me this medal?” Eggsy asks, drawing the chain out from under his shirt, making sure that it doesn’t tangle with his dog tags.

“Yes.” Harry’s gaze is heavy and grim. Then it changes into something halfway hopeful. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have done more, but if you’d like, it’d be my privilege to offer you the same opportunity that your father had."

“What opportunity? ‘M already in the Marines,” Eggsy says, tapping the patch on his uniform.

“Not quite. You see, your father was undergoing a rigorous selection process for a rather more discreet position in a private organisation.”

“Like a spy?” Eggsy asks, jumping to a conclusion.

“Of sorts. Interested?”

“I thought you was a tailor.”

“In my downtime,” Harry says idly.

“Does it pay better than the Marines?”

“Significantly. Housing is provided for successful candidates as down payment.”

“You takin’ the piss?” Eggsy blurts before covering his mouth hastily. This man may not be King anymore but he’s spent most of this life and all of the last knowing Harry as Albert so he tries to censor himself when he remembers. He’s been admonished by one too many fussy maids while he worked for Albert to shirk the habit so quickly.

“Not at all. Think on it, if you must, but do hurry. I have a schedule to keep,” Harry says pleasantly like he’s not asking for Eggsy to drop everything to follow him. “I’ll deal with your superiors,” Harry adds, as if reading his mind.

“I don’t doubt that.” The confidence that Albert lacked is now present in spades in Harry. He is self-assured in a way that Albert would’ve fought tooth and nail to even approach. Eggsy supposes that not having a neglectful, abusive arse of a nanny that played favourites would’ve helped anyone.

“Shall we?” Harry asks, getting up. “I would give you a demonstration of my particular skillset, but I don’t think the people who frequent pubs in places like these would take very nicely to waking up without memories of their last 24 hours.”

Eggsy thinks back on the blokes in the camp, the ones who are good at what they do and wear that knowledge like a badge on their ego, thinks of what it might mean that Harry is capable of wiping clean 24 hours’ worth of memories, and tells Harry, “No, I really don’t think they would.”

\---

Harry’s not a lot like Albert. He doesn’t stammer, his words don’t stop dead on the edge of his teeth, and he walks with the surety of a man who knows precisely how to disarm his opponents in any sort of manner thinkable. It’s attractive, immensely so, and Eggsy, who has fallen in love once with a charmingly earnest King, finds himself falling in love now with a Knight. Of Kingsman. What a coincidence.

Jamal used to fancy himself an author. He would’ve called Albert’s transformation into Harry an excellent if extreme example of character development. Eggsy just thinks that the universe is out to get him.

No, needless to say it’s not good enough that he’s had to spend one lifetime pining hopelessly for a married man. Now he must spend the rest of this life as the protégé of said man, who, instead of cringing behind a desk every time he sends off a new batch of freshly trained _teenagers_ to war, is now the frontline of Her Majesty’s defences. (Except, of course, Harry denies ever rejecting any missions that might question his alignment with the Crown. He is a consummate professional—he does not have time for frivolous emotional attachments.)

Even his bloody _wrinkles_ make him look dignified, what the fuck.

Now that he’s not King, Harry adopts the mantle of a gentleman. He’s posh and polite and holds himself like nobility, and Eggsy wouldn’t be surprised if, on further digging, he discovers that Harry has noble—or even _royal_ —blood in him. Hart sounds like an established family name. Harry makes it very hard for Eggsy to forget any inappropriate feelings that have lingered from his past life.

He is also a sarcastic shit in a way that Albert would never have dared to be, but dresses his bite in velvet pleasantries. It’s quite mesmerising, really, watching Harry flay people apart without batting an eyelash while his conversation partners continue simpering with no idea of how utterly thoroughly they’ve been insulted. He puts all of Albert’s learned political gesturing to sinfully good use. Albert was a good man thrust into greatness. Harry is a great man parading in the skin and dress of a genuinely good one.

Also, Merlin should really stop letting Eggsy watch Harry’s mission feeds if he wants Eggsy to have any chance of concentrating on his training.

\---

The dreams don’t stop. But now, exposed to Harry with a closeness that Eggsy has never once dared to dream of, whether in a life long faded from memories or this unbelievable second chance, details start overwhelming his senses.

He remembers the touch of Albert’s large hands on his shoulders as he is steered into his home. There is a hint of cologne that’s been largely swallowed by the petrichor of a London shower, and the heat of his palm leaves a lasting burn on his skin even after he has been directed to a servant’s sleeping pallet.

Albert delivers bedtime stories to his girls in his hesitant voice, ‘r’s unfurling into soft ‘w’s as he tries endearingly to charm his daughters with tales of birds and animals and an unparalleled understandings of the London Underground’s train timings. It takes a special sort of person to make even the Tube sound interesting, and it’s a talent—albeit a rather unhelpful one—that Albert never gave himself enough credit for.

Late night conversations after he delivers a final round of biscuits while Albert sequesters himself in his office are awash in the smell of cooled tea and the sounds raindrops tapping soft rhythms against a windowpane. It feels like the air has suddenly given way to the ocean when Elizabeth comes into give her husband a goodnight kiss and then crosses the room to lavish upon him a gentle embrace as Albert smiles at them approvingly. Her kindness is a bitter reminder of the filthiness of his mind, an ugly, messy desire that burns deep in his gut and sears down his spine with every yearning beat of his traitorous heart.

He is unfit for this. He doesn’t deserve to light the fear and anguish in Albert’s eyes when he tells him that he’s been drafted, isn’t worthy of his concern or his worry. People like him ought to burn in a special place in hell for wanting things they shouldn’t, and it is the least he can do to make sure that his death will buy Albert time to eventually end the war.

On his last, shaking breath, he lies back, Albert’s signature a bright impression behind his lids, and thinks of England, thinks of her King, thinks of home.

Eggsy wakes up in the training barracks with sweat sticking his collar to his neck and forces himself to remember that he has never done anything to betray Elizabeth, that he has been the model of restraint. He fails, because even if he has never so much as touched Albert, he has thought of it many times. Far too many times. The deed has been done many times, over and over again in his mind. Harry’s sardonic smirk comes to mind and it overlays with Albert’s shy smile far too readily for comfort, and Eggsy wants to punch himself for having so loose a mind.

He may not have done anything, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t— _doesn’t_ —wish he had— _has_ —and this is far greater a betrayal than if he had done anything but damn near practically thrown his heart at Albert—and _Harry_.

\---

If Eggsy ever thought that being caught in a cycle of unrequited love for two lifetimes in a row is the worst thing to ever happen to him, his own death notwithstanding, then he completely reconsiders when he watches Harry’s death come straight at him from the barrel of a gun.

This is far, far worse. Eggsy’s heart dies with him.

He died too early the last time. In this life, he gets to suffer the heartbreak of losing his beloved a second time. He wonders if Albert ever felt this lost over his death.

Probably not.

Albert wasn’t his. If anyone’s death should break him, it should be Elizabeth’s, and thank god Albert died before she did or Eggsy wouldn’t be able to live knowing that Albert had felt the same cold hands gripping his heart and stilling it for the brief moment it takes him to realise that Harry will never grace him with his infuriating smartarse comments ever again.

It feels like the skies have opened up and beyond it there is nothing but a roiling expanse of unending darkness. There is no path Eggsy can take that will lead him away from the chill, and this, he thinks, is at long last the retribution that he’s been waiting for.

His punishment for daring to love somebody like Albert, like Harry.

He makes it through the confrontation with Arthur only because his chest and mind are numb enough to stop him from crumpling to the ground immediately. He takes down Valentine with desperate recklessness while his heart pounds heavily in his ears, a roaring condemnation that demands to know why he is still alive despite the fact that the man he has grown to love a second time is no longer alive.

He hates that his heart didn’t stop with Harry’s. It carries on like a deadweight, a great misshapen lump of regret settling deep and heavy in the middle of his chest, caged behind the bars of his ribs like it’s something worth protecting.

It’s really not, not when there’s nothing else to live for.

\---

The thing is, Harry wasn’t even upset when Eggsy failed to shoot his dog, his tiny, wheezing pup whose very existence depended on him, and it makes his death so many times worse. He just sighed when Eggsy finally wound up at his house and said to him in the same resigned tones that Albert used to use far too often (but, instead of directing them at Eggsy, they were always turned, so very heart-wrenchingly, on himself), “I knew this would happen.”

“If you knew it then why propose me?” Eggsy demanded, brashness poured into his voice as if it could distract Harry from the raw ache that simmered just beneath the façade of every word.

“I had hoped that you might have changed. Now I see that you haven’t. It’s a wonder you ever made it through military training both times,” Harry said as he pinched his nose, his other hand trailing along the balustrade with those graceful fingers of his. Even when he was Albert, his hands never shook the way his voice did.

Eggsy deflated. “Is that a bad thing?”

Harry looked at him squarely and Eggsy couldn’t tell if he was proud or disappointed. Knowing Albert and knowing Harry, he was probably feeling both at the same time. “Not as such, no. But you must remember, Eggsy, that in this line of work your kindness is all too easily exploitable.” He gestured toward the couches and they settled into the cushions like a pair of tired old men.

“It’s not gonna get much chance t’be exploited, then. I’ve been kicked out, ‘aven’t I? Roxy’s got the job,” Eggsy said, shrugging.

“Do you remember Amelia? She didn’t die. We planted her. She works in our tech department in Berlin. You could always join as a non-field operative in the U.K. division. God knows Merlin needs an assistant,” Harry suggested. “You’ve always had a particular talent for rousing speeches.”

“Ain’t that more your department? They’ve even made a film ‘bout you,” Eggsy smiled half-heartedly.

Harry scrubbed his face again. “Don’t remind me.”

“It was good though, wasn’t it? Very accurate. I could’ve sworn that the woman who played the Queen Mother were the Missus herself.”

“Her name’s Helena, and she was in fact Elizabeth.”

Eggsy felt something sharp dig suddenly and painfully between his ribs. “Oh.”

“She doesn’t remember,” Harry waved off. “If you were more aware of contemporary film industry you would know that she is—was—happily married. I bumped into her once along the Thames, even called her Liz, but she only asked if I wanted a signature.”

“I’m sorry,” Eggsy offered.

“Don’t be. I prefer it this way. I have no intention of rekindling any sort of flame with her.”

“Still. It’s got t’be tough, knowin’ that she don’t remember you. I would’ve ‘ated it if you didn’t remember me.”

“What a happy coincidence it is for you, then, that I do,” Harry said, faking mildly pleasant surprise.

Eggsy shot Harry a sour look. “But why don’t you want to, uh, rekindle any sort of flame with ‘er? You was married to ‘er at one point. I ‘eard that you even ‘ad t’propose three times. You must’ve liked ‘er a lot.”

“I’m not exactly a carbon copy of Albert, you realise,” Harry said dryly. “I find myself interested in a different persuasion.”

“Different per—oh.” Eggsy’s teeth clicked against each other as he quickly pulled his jaw close.

“I wouldn’t assume the same for you, of course.”

“You’re not wrong. Nothin’s changed on that front. I’ve always been into blokes, y’know,” Eggsy muttered uncomfortably, fingers rubbing the back of his neck. “Or, uh, maybe you don’t know. I ‘aven’t exactly advertised it.”

Harry blinked once, twice. “As Albert, I had suspected as much. That would certainly explain why you’ve never brought home a sweet young thing for Elizabeth to either approve of or protect you from.”

“Well, yeah, the public weren’t always this acceptin’ of people like me. Like us, I guess, since you’re in the same boat as me now.” Eggsy leaned his elbows on his knees. “It’s weird, innit? Just 50 years ago I were an aberration, but now they’re flyin’ the flags everywhere, and I can get honest t’god _married_.”

“Things happen, times change,” Harry smiled. “I for one am glad that the world finally did something right for once.”

“You and me both.”

“As for those ‘inappropriate feelings’ you told me about when I recruited you…”

“Very inappropriate,” Eggsy interrupted hastily. “Not at all suitable for polite company. You’d be positively scandalised.”

“You of little faith. Let me be the judge of that. Was it our butler?”

“No. Seriously, you should stop now.”

Harry just grinned. “One of our guards? What about the postman? The newsboy? No, don’t tell me, my own _brother_?”

“No, no, no, and oh, _god,_ _no_! Why would you even think that? David was a disaster waitin’ to ‘appen! I still can’t believe ‘e married Mrs. Simpson and left _you_ with the throne!”

“I barely believe it myself some days,” Harry muttered, agreeing. “It seemed like such a spectacularly bad idea at that time—the worst decision he ever made as King, if the tabloids were to be believed. But we know how careless he was with state papers. It was for the better. The milkman, then? One of the other servant boys?”

“‘arry, if you value your life or your sanity, you will stop right now.”

Harry contemplated Eggsy for a while, and Eggsy had a horrible notion that he was being stripped down to his very bones, his every last thought laid out like a badly written, badly scripted soap opera for Harry’s perusal. He sat, stiff and terrified, unable to move under Harry’s scrutiny, until Harry took a deep breath and uttered with wide, round eyes, “You don’t mean to say…”

“If I said yes would you stop starin’ at me?”

“I—” Harry started, but a call came through from Merlin and he never finished that sentence. His expression, previously open and almost naked with disbelief, closed in as he pulled on the persona of professionalism and exchanged rapid conversations with the quartermaster. Eggsy simply sat on Harry’s couch with a spine that had been replaced with a steel rod and waited for the noose—one that had been around his neck since he first allowed his dreams to venture so deeply into desire that he felt Albert’s fingers drawing burning lies down his skin and his mouth pressing shivering words against his throat in his sleep—to tighten around his neck.

When Harry terminated the connection with Merlin, his eyes were set in stone, and all he said was, “We’ll finish this when I get back.”

Then he left the house, left Eggsy, and never came back.

**Author's Note:**

> 1 I haven't watched Testament of Youth, but I am aware that Edward Brittain served in WWI and am choosing to ignore that. In fact, I am ignoring the entirety of that movie (and real history). The only things I borrowed were a name and Taron's face. Edward Brittain's backstory in this fic is completely made up.
> 
> I headcanon that Harry recruits his candidates from the Marines, so that's why he was there at Eggsy's barracks--to scout or approach somebody he's already singled out.
> 
> This was supposed to be part of a longer story, but I am somewhat concerned that I won't be able to finish it, so I'm just posting the first of goodness knows how many parts as a complete, stand-alone fic of its own. This part was written nearly one and a half months ago, so I thought it was about time I stopped dithering about. And of course Harry isn't dead. Harry never dies. *forever in denial*


End file.
